Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to online social communities and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for predicting community reaction to a post to an online social community.
Description of the Related Art
With the evolution of social media, enterprise marketers are increasing the reach of social networks to leverage business needs. Products such as ADOBE CQ® Social Communities are used for providing a community forum engaging and interacting with customers. These forums may be used for conveying product understanding to the customer, gathering feedback on products, and understanding the customer needs among others. Other communities may be for larger social interactions, such as FACEBOOK®, or TWITTER®, or other online communities sharing common interests, such as a specific technology, or a political event.
The environment of such social communities tends to be volatile. Products such as ADOBE® SocialAnalytics, measure the impact of social media on a business. These products enable marketers to understand how conversations on social networks and online communities influence marketing performance. Generally, positive and negative sentiments expressed by members in such communities tend to have a cascade effect owing to the potential speed of dispersal and wide reach of material published on such online social communities. A post is any message published on an online forum or newsgroup and may include social posts on social platforms such as FACEBOOK®, TWITTER®, and the like, blogs, or marketing materials posted by enterprise marketers. A single post that evokes negative reaction from the community members may lead to significant damage to reputations and brand images within very short periods of time. A marketer can typically do little to curtail the negative publicity.
A community's reaction may be any reaction to an online conversation including responding, pressing a “like” button, sharing the post, emailing a post, quantifying a number of responses, likes, shares, emails or duration of responses, likes, shares, and the like. Preventive measures are generally set up to avoid evoking negative reactions on such social communities. To prevent negative community reaction, understanding the pulse of the community becomes vital. Currently, marketers laboriously scan the posts and reactions of the social community to the posts to understand the pulse of the community. However, the sheer number of posts and reactions make a thorough scan unfeasible, leaving the marketer to resort to guess work while making critical decisions regarding publishing a post.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus for predicting community reaction to a post to an online social community.